Emre Sevinç > Emre's Quotes

“Note that in the above construction we made a number of choices; here we must beware. Choosing a good categorification – like designing a good algebraic structure such as that of preorders or quantales – is part of the art of mathematics. There is no prescribed way to categorify, and the success of a chosen categorification is rather empirical: its richer structure should allow us more insights into the subject we want to model.”
― Brendan Fong, Seven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Category Theory

“Regular expressions are widely used for string matching. Although regular-expression systems are derived from a perfectly good mathematical formalism, the particular choices made by implementers to expand the formalism into useful software systems are often disastrous: the quotation conventions adopted are highly irregular; the egregious misuse of parentheses, both for grouping and for backward reference, is a miracle to behold. In addition, attempts to increase the expressive power and address shortcomings of earlier designs have led to a proliferation of incompatible derivative languages.”
― Chris Hanson, Software Design for Flexibility: How to Avoid Programming Yourself into a Corner

“Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“Hope is not a design method.”
― Michael T. Nygard, Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

“Release is the beginning of the software’s true life; everything before that release is gestation. Either systems grow over time, adapting to their changing environment, or they decay until their costs outweigh their benefits and then die.”
― Michael T. Nygard, Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

“Design with skepticism, and you will achieve resilience. Ask, “What can system X do to hurt me?” and then design a way to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge whatever wrench your supposed ally throws.”
― Michael T. Nygard, Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

“Bugs will happen. They cannot be eliminated, so they must be survived instead.”
― Michael T. Nygard, Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

“The main lesson here is that not every problem can be solved at the level of abstraction where it manifests.”
― Michael T. Nygard, Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

“Design with skepticism, and you will achieve resilience.”
― Michael T. Nygard, Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

“First, nothing is as permanent as a temporary fix. Most of these remained in place for the next year or two.”
― Michael T. Nygard, Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

“Note that there is not a focus on eliminating failures. Systems without failures, although robust, become brittle and fragile. When failures occur, it is more likely that the teams responding will be unprepared, and this could dramatically increase the impact of the incident.”
― Laine Campbell, Database Reliability Engineering: Designing and Operating Resilient Database Systems

“Two examples illustrate the redundancy principle. First, when a virtual machine fails in a cloud-based system, an identical instance is started automatically. Second, a critically important system should have at least one secondary backup system that runs in parallel with the primary system to ensure a safe fallback. Leading up to the next principle, we note that the secondary system should differ from the primary system to avoid both failing for the same reasons.”
― Kjell Jorgen Hole, Anti-fragile ICT Systems

“Many man-made systems, including ICT systems, have positive feedback loops that cause certain local events to propagate and create extreme global behaviors. The extreme behaviors, especially unplanned downtime, become more common than stakeholders can accept. These outliers are modeled by probability distributions with thick tails. Unfortunately, classical methods for risk analysis based on predictions of future events tend to underestimate or ignore extreme global behaviors in complex adaptive ICT systems, even though these events may very well dominate the overall risk to stakeholders.”
― Kjell Jorgen Hole, Anti-fragile ICT Systems

“... we should develop and operate so-called anti-fragile systems characterized by two important properties: First, an anti-fragile ICT system fails early with a small, local impact to break positive feedback loops before they can create extreme global behaviors. Second, the prevention of extreme global behaviors allows stakeholders to learn from small-impact incidents about new vulnerabilities caused by changes in the system and its environment. The vulnerabilities can then be mitigated to avoid future extreme behaviors.”
― Kjell Jorgen Hole, Anti-fragile ICT Systems

“There is no point in waiting for the right moment when a smooth change might be possible; this moment will never arrive, history will never provide us with such an opportunity. One has to take the risk and intervene, even if reaching the goal appears (and is, in some sense) impossible - only by doing this can one change the situation so that the impossible becomes possible, in a way that can never be predicted.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“Anyone can achieve their fullest potential, who we are might be predetermined, but the path we follow is always of our own choosing. We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny. Your destiny can't be changed but, it can be challenged. Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.”
― Martin Heidegger

“Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. ”
― Martin Heidegger

“Foolishness consists in believing you understand what you really don't.”
― Silvano Levy, Decoding Magritte

“Freedom is only to be found where there is burden to be shouldered. In creative achievements this burden always represents an imperative and a need that weighs heavily upon man’s mood, so that he comes to be in a mood of melancholy. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, whether we are clearly aware of the fact or not, whether we speak at length about it or not. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, but this is not to say that everyone in a melancholy mood is creative.”
― Martin Heidegger

“no true knowledge is ever reached without pain.”
― Naomi Alderman, Disobedience

“Often in life, it's the older males who get credit for the work that young people and women do. It isn't right, but that's how it works.”
― Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

“Central Africa was a region without writing, but not without a history. Hundreds, yea thousands of years of human history preceded the arrival of the Europeans. If a heart of darkness existed back then, it was sooner to be found in the ignorance with which white explorers viewed the area than in the area itself. Darkness, too, is in the eye of the beholder.”
― David Van Reybrouck, Congo: een geschiedenis

“In 1830 Belgium became independent after an opera performance; in 1959 Congo demands independence after a soccer match.”
― David Van Reybrouck, Congo: een geschiedenis

“The best way to become essential for the companies that buy your products is to help them grow their business (i.e., to produce meaningful ROI) in unique ways. That is what solving customer problems is all about, and it’s as neat an encapsulation of the difference between enterprise and consumer software as we can offer.”
― Blair Reeves, Building Products for the Enterprise: Product Management in Enterprise Software

“By definition, a tool exists to improve something you are already doing. If you're not doing formal data governance yet, or if you are doing it poorly, then casting about for a tool to help you deploy DG is a waste of time. This flies in the face of typical IT philosophy, where the tool is usually acquired first. This is a notoriously silly thing to do. However, our work always has us putting the brakes on a tool selection project. It is easy to buy a tool and install it. However, most of the time we witness new tools for data management sitting unused or poorly deployed. This is because no one has mastered the process the tool is supporting.”
― John Ladley, Data Governance: How to Design, Deploy and Sustain an Effective Data Governance Program

“Objection is when I say: this doesn't suit me. Resistance is when I make sure that what doesn't suit me never happens again.”
― Ulrike Meinhof

“Protest is when I say I don't like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don't like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too.”
― Ulrike Meinhof

“A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”
― Martin Heidegger

“You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore”
― André Gide